NOODLES OF INTENSE CURIOSITY

NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg is a self proclaimed crafter. A week ago she made a stuffed dinosaur from scraps on the space station. The little T-rex is made form the lining of Russian food containers and the toy is stuffed with scraps from an old T-shirt. While many toys have flown into space, this is the first produced in space.

apparently our high school, which is 96 years old and looks like a 16th century gothic castle (complete with lion gargoyles), has a fourth floor that no one really knew about until this year. no one knows how long it’s been in the building but from pictures it looks completely different than the rest and has a strange metal staircase in a spiral pattern. 

there is also a basement in the high school with a swimming pool but no one is allowed down there and it is starting to rot the first floor.

for a good while there was a nice elderly black man that would stand outside of random stores and street corners and dance to make people smile. however, in the past few months he has disappeared and is nowhere to be found.

we have a kapstone paper mill in our town and it is regularly normal but some days the smell is absolutely overwhelming and blankets the town like a thick fog.

the abandoned movie theater is blocked off to the public but i was talking to some girls from school about it who occasionally break in to chill what it is like on the inside, and they said that there is a giant, bottomless hole in the entrance’s floor so they have to tiptoe across a single plank of wood to get to the other side. 

fairly popular places in town will close down for literally no reason. 

one time a tornado came through our town and it destroyed the sonic drive-in and a car dealership next to it but no debris could be found. only the empty lots were there. they rebuilt the sonic in less than a month but the car rental lot was kept empty and now bored teenagers harp around it like vultures.

one time my grandmother saw an unidentified animal in our backyard. she thought it was a fox but when my dog barked at it, it stood up on its back legs and ran away.

fox and coyote sightings are becoming strangely frequent in one single area of town and no one knows why???? its like they all congregate near a horse stable by an old junkyard my cousin used to work at.

whenever a dog runs away from home they all end up coming to my house. every dog that gets loose.

my grandmother saw an unidentified bird in a tree and i still can’t figure out what kind it was based on her description. 

sometimes you can hear random gunshots and loud, unknown bestial screams in the uptown areas

I had to return to Portland tonight because I have work tomorrow. ACLU & International Refugee Assistance Project attorneys will be back at SeaTac tomorrow at 5:30 a.m. (including my law school bestie, I am so proud). 

There were 13 people detained at SeaTac yesterday who were secretly transferred to a detention facility in Tacoma, so the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project is working with attorneys to straighten that right out. 

Basically: Shit is going down, y’all. The women I went up with today? Both were Arabs. One was from Pakistan, the other was from Lebanon (a Christian, a Muslim and a Jew walk into an airport…). When I asked them if I was overreacting by feeling like this was a coup-in-progress, they said no. That’s precisely what this is.

I thought we had a coup-proof system. I was mistaken.

And they’re pulling an old trick from the national-security handbook that’s been used to evade the courts on issues like domestic surveillance: “Lawyers and advocates still didn’t know how many people were being held in the secondary inspection area at Dulles or what their immigration status was, which led to a catch-22: Attorneys couldn’t file for contempt of court without having proof that legal residents were being detained and not being given access to lawyers, but they couldn’t get proof without getting access.” (x)

At least two VA reps have found out (via friends and family) about constituents being detained at Dulles, at which point CBP released them in order to dodge the access-to-lawyers issue. The representative for my district is on the warpath–and also on the House Oversight Committee. Here’s hoping these fuckers get slapped with contempt of court so hard their ears ring, then get hauled in front of a committee hearing to see if they want to try their chances with contempt of Congress.

All of which doesn’t even get into the Monday Night Massacre clusterfuck inside the executive branch, when the acting attorney general of the United States refused to make the DoJ defend the lawfulness of the immigration order in court. And was summarily fired and replaced with someone more compliant. So here’s also hoping the Senate puts Jeff Sessions through absolute hell on his role in all this before they vote to confirm him as AG.